


Tartarus, Revisited

by ssrhpurgatory



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: (Not literally this time), Angst, During Change of Mind, F/M, I wrote the original version to make me cry, Mind Games, Mindfuck, Pre-Canon, if it makes you cry too that's fine, this one made me cry more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27733552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Eris decides to torment Elias Selberg by wearing the face of a dead woman and making him face his past.
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert/Original Female Character, Eris/Alexander Hilbert
Comments: 5
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Tartarus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21380848) by [ssrhpurgatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory). 



> Technically a re-write of Tartarus, only with more material that slots in directly around the canon material and zero (0) smut, because every time I re-read Tartarus I kept getting annoyed by... several bits of it.

Elias Selberg found it difficult to get back to work after he finished Officer Fisher’s medical examination. An irritating lapse. But Fisher’s words lingered, and so did the rumors Elias had heard over time. He found himself wondering if he could trust his own senses, or his own memories.

Had he and Officer Fisher actually travelled from the cargo bay to his lab? The memory was there, but given how real the scenario the Box had presented to them had felt, how was Elias to know whether they had actually gone from one place to the other the traditional way? Perhaps they had just been placed in this room, like insects in a box, the memory of the trip placed in his head the same way, maneuvered by a power he couldn’t perceive.

Elias was not a religious man, and never had been. The idea of some divine plan for the universe, some outside force manipulating events… the thought of it had always given him cold shudders. He could not conceive of a being with the power to manipulate the world in that way who would choose to allow such pain to occur. There was no higher purpose to suffering; it was simply suffering, pain with no point to it.

The thought that Command might have lured them into a scenario where their actions were influenced by some sort of AI, with Marcus Cutter at the core… that, he could believe in, though it made him shudder for entirely different reasons. He had worked for Goddard Futuristics for too long to take any of the events of earlier that day at face value.

But he had not been able to bring himself to voice these suspicions to Officer Fisher while the man had still been in his lab, had even been happy to move Fisher along before the man had the chance to ask any questions that were _too_ uncomfortably close to the truth. And as much the thought nagged at Elias that this might not be over, that there were things Command didn’t even tell _him_ about and that this was one of them, he had always known how to set aside his own worries and get the job done. This was no different. He seemed to be in his lab, and there was no conclusive evidence to the contrary. There was work to be done, the results of Fisher’s examination to analyze. He did it.

That examination had revealed some worrying symptoms. Fisher’s Decima infection was not in an active stage, or should not be, but that chest tightness… Elias had put the man on a mild anti-viral, just in case, mixed with an antihistamine, which should clear up the chest congestion. The last trial had ended with a total failure of the subject’s pulmonary system, and Elias was not eager for a repeat performance of that catastrophe. But a careful examination of the blood samples he had taken from Fisher should give him some idea of what might be going on.

A chime rang out, followed by Dr. Fourier’s voice. “Good evening, everybody. We are five minutes out from the start of the stellar flare. If you are interested in seeing this—and again, you should be, never-before seen attraction, _don’t miss it_ —then make your way to the observation deck. Thank you.” A second chime marked the end of the announcement, and Elias turned back to the task at hand.

“Rhea, I am commencing the observation cycle for sample RX-22. Please lower laboratory temperature by three and a half degrees.”

There was a beep and the sound of text scrolling from Rhea’s nearby console as Elias settled into work, no doubt the AI asking why he was not leaving to join the others. He ignored it, hooking his feet through one of the anchor points on the floor and bending over his microscope. “No, my ears are working perfectly well. Heard Fourier. Have no intention of wasting time on frivolous distraction.”

There was a second, more insistent beep from Rhea, one more small annoyance in a day of annoyances. “Rhea, I am _trying_ to work, distractions cannot be—“ But as he lifted his head and read what was actually written on her screen, he frowned. “What? Why are you… Why are you so concerned about Officer Fisher’s health?” First the man himself asking awkward questions, and now the AI unit. He would have to take a look at some of the muzzle programs that he had installed on Command’s orders. Perhaps one was malfunctioning.

More text scrolled across Rhea’s screen. “Why don’t you tell Officer Fisher what’s really going on?”

The words sent a jolt of alarm through Elias, though he did his best to respond calmly, keeping his voice deliberately slow and steady. Goodness knew what inputs the AI was picking up; he knew that her sensors could detect respiration, heartbeats, heat signatures. “Rhea… I do not know what you are… insinuating, but—“

Another beep, more text. “You and I both know that there’s more to this than some tightness in his chest.”

“There is _absolutely_ nothing out of the ordinary. I promise that—“

“He won’t die like all the rest of them did?”

Elias stared at the text, wide-eyed. “How do you know that?”

There was no answer. No more insistent beeps, no more scrolling text. Nothing.

He was angry now, and scared. He knew that his work relied on secrecy. If the rest of the crew knew what he was doing, he had no doubt they would react with fear, anger, disgust… but if _Command_ found out that his research was out in the open… no, do not think about that _,_ he told himself. “Answer. **How do you know that**?”

There was no response from the AI.

There was a pop from somewhere behind him, and a burst of displaced air, cold against the back of his neck.

“Privyet, Dmitri.”

That voice. _That voice_.

That voice did not belong to anyone on this station.

That voice did not belong to anyone _alive_.

Elias anchored himself on the edge of the microscope stand and executed a careful half-turn.

After a moment of careful study, he spoke. “You cannot be her,” he said, his voice distant and shocked even to his own ears. “You are far too young, and her Russian was never so good.”

The woman who had just appeared in his lab was young and vital, her hair a giant cloud of curls around her face, her clothing completely inappropriate for microgravity. And she was laughing at him. “Oh, it’s _so_ nice to finally meet you, Dmitri.”

His birth name made him flinch, these days. “Stop that.”

“Why? It’s so much _fun_ watching you react.” The woman smiled, bright and startling, a smile that had always made his heart jump and jolt uncomfortably within his chest.

“Because you are not her, and you do not have the right to call me by that name.” No one did, these days. Not even some illusion who bore a startling resemblance to the woman who… to the woman who…

“Oh, I disagree.” She smiled and executed a little midair spin that sent the skirt of her dress flaring out, coming to an impossibly still halt the minute she was done, in direct defiance of physics. “Don’t I look like her?”

“Not as I ever knew her.” Perhaps this woman, whoever she was, bore _some_ resemblance to his one-time lab manager, but Elias doubted that Rosemary Epps had ever looked like _this_ in life. Her current clothing bore no resemblance to the structured dresses of the 50s, to what Rosemary would have worn when the same age as this woman appeared to be.

Not that he had known her then.

He took a deep breath, tried to bring order to his thoughts.

He was faced with two options.

Option one: he was hallucinating, and this was what his mind had decided to conjure up. Perhaps not entirely out of the question, given the solar flare activity that they should, in theory, be seeing just about now. Some of the radiation Wolf 359 put off was nothing like what he might encounter on earth; misfiring neurons presenting him with a hallucination of his former lab manager as a young woman might be the least distressing thing he would see today.

Option two… option two was more likely, and those earlier suspicions came rushing back. He and his crew mates could still be locked in the simulation inside Box 953, which meant…

“What are you?” he asked, frowning at this woman, this _thing_ who had _clearly_ chosen the shape of one woman in particular in order to disorient him. “Some kind of command program?” Though hadn’t that been Mr. Cutter?

She laughed again and held out her hand as if to shake. “I’m Eris.”

Elias eyed the offered hand dubiously, one eyebrow raised, and after a moment she shrugged and withdrew it. “Eris,” he repeated.

She grinned, rather naughtily, looking so much like Rosemary for a moment that he could not breathe. “Don’t wear it out.”

He took a deep, stilling breath. Better. “And what is your purpose?”

She put her finger to her lips, as if to shush him. “Not telling.”

And then, with a loud pop of displaced air, she was gone.

The others. Elias needed to tell the others that they were still inside Box 953. Not that it would do any good, but…

“Captain Lovelace?” No, of course the comms wouldn’t work. But he tried again, just in case. “Lieutenant Lambert? Officer Fisher? Dr. Hui? Dr. Fourier?”

No answer to any of his hails.

He went to the door of his lab next. Perhaps he would be able to leave. Perhaps he could find someone. Anyone.

It surprised him when the door opened.

It did not surprise him when he turned a corner _should_ have lead him towards the observation deck and instead revealed the open door to his lab. He made a few more attempts to go somewhere, trying for the comms room, for engineering, for one of the other labs, but every time he found himself facing his open lab door down.

So. He was being toyed with, though he did not know whether to lay his displeasure at the feet of Cutter or upon this new player, this _Eris_.

For the lack of anything better to do, he went back to his lab and began working. Not that the work he was doing meant anything, now that he knew this place was not real, but he could not think of anything better to do. And at least he found the work calming.

As he worked, he tried to make sense of it all. He had thought that Mr. Cutter was running the show, but what did that make this Eris… thing? He refused to think of her as a person; to do so would be to acknowledge the face she wore, and if he did that… no. Best not to think about that. So many unacknowledged secrets, crowding his mind, clamoring for attention. He shoved them all away and focused on the matter at hand.

Eris. _Eris_. He tried to remember whether he had heard the name from some other crew. He knew the origin of it, of course; the Greek goddess of strife and discord, no doubt named—created?—by Miranda Pryce, who seemed to have an insufferable fondness for naming her creations so. And there had been rumors of extreme measures carried out upon crews where discord and strife were the day-to-day order of things, against crews who spent more time fighting with one another than they spent getting their jobs done. But Elias had always dismissed such rumors as nonsense.

Perhaps they were not quite as much nonsense as he had always thought.

But unless Eris returned, unless Mr. Cutter reappeared, unless Elias got more information from somewhere, there was nothing he could prove.

The silence was eating at him, just as all those unexamined thoughts were. He tried the comms panel again, just in case. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Yes, doctor, we’re here. Are you all right?” Captain Lovelace’s voice sent a spike of relief through him.

“Fine, Captain. Fine.”

Before he could say anything else, another voice cut in. “Let’s see if it stays that way. Solve the mystery, tell me who killed Captain Lorre… or I’m going to delete all of Dr. Selberg’s memories. Factory reset.”

“ ** _What?_** ” She wouldn’t. She _couldn’t._ Command would not allow such a thing… would they?

There was another little puff of air as he protested, and Eris appeared next to him again. She put her finger to her lips and widened her eyes in warning, and then kept talking. “You can talk through the problem with your two consultants, but I _will_ need the final answer to come from one of you three. How does that sound?”

“It sounds nuts!” Captain Lovelace shouted. “You can’t expect us to just… figure this out from whatever bits and pieces we saw!”

Elias agreed, but when he opened his mouth, no sound came out.

“Oh, you saw everything you need, but…” She tapped her lower lip with one forefinger, as if considering. “I’ll give you a clue, in exchange for a week of Dr. Hui’s time.”

“Excuse me?” Hui sounded horrified.

“I’ll speed up his subjective perception of time. Ten seconds will feel like a week from his point of view. And I’ll need Dr. Fourier to be the one that confirms this, thank you very much.”

“I can’t just—“ Fourier sounded as horrified as her fellow scientist.

“You have three minutes. Starting… _now._ ” Eris draped her arm across Elias’s shoulders and nestled up against his side. He tried to move, to shove her away, but he could not seem to do that, either. “Don’t worry, darling, I’ll let you say your piece,” she said as the others started discussing the matter. “Just pretend I’m not here.”

“There was damage in the lab too,” Captain Lovelace was saying. “Part of the fighting?”

“Or damage from escaped sample,” Selberg heard himself say. “Captain said it was too dangerous to continue experimentation.”

“And there’d been someone else—an Emily? She’d gotten shot, and—“

“Two and a half minutes,” Eris chimed in from somewhere near Elias’s ear.

“So, what? A mutiny, a second-in-command, an alien sample, someone who was shot—“ Lovelace sounded overwhelmed.

“Too many variables, it’s too many variables to—“ Fourier muttered.

“Fourier—“

“ **No.** ”

“We don’t have time to—“

“I am _not_ doing that to—“

“Just _do it_ , Victoire. I’ll be fine,” Hui broke in, interrupting Lovelace and Fourier’s exchange.

The sound of a deep breath, Fourier’s voice through gritted teeth. “Eris! Give us a clue.”

“Just a moment…”

Over the next ten seconds, Elias felt almost grateful that the worst Eris was currently doing to him was wearing the face of his dead lab manager and being distressingly handsy. Even the factory reset she had threatened him with might be better than what she had just put Hui through.

“Aaand _done._ Let’s see how he’s doing.”

“Hui?” Lovelace’s voice was worried.

Fourier’s was frantic. “Kuan?”

“Please…” He let out a desperate pant of breath. “Please don’t… don’t do that again. There’s nothing here. Just… _nothing_. And—“

“Eris, what’s our clue?” Lambert interrupted. Always on task, that man.

Eris chuckled, tracing a finger down Elias’s neck. “The person that killed Captain Lorre sided… _with_ him during the mutiny.”

“How is that helpful?” Lovelace asked, incredulous.

“No,” Fourier butted in, talking quickly. “That’s good. Eliminates almost every candidate. Had to be the biologist or the second-in-command.” She kept muttering, fast, almost inaudible.

Elias missed what came next. He was distracted by Eris, who had just pressed her lips to the skin of his neck, right beneath his ear. “Stop that,” he said, surprised to hear his own voice.

“But it’s so much fun,” she responded, pulling her head back to look at him, eyes wide and innocent. Not that he had ever believed in expressions of innocence on that face. “All I need to do to get _them_ all riled up is leave them alone to fight among themselves. But you’re a much tougher nut to crack, doctor.” She cleared her throat, turned her attention to the comms panel on the wall, which lit up without her touching it. “Minute and a half…”

Pay attention. He needed to pay attention. It was his _mind_ on the line.

Lovelace sighed. “Do it.”

“No, I can solve this,” Fourier insisted.

“No, you can’t. We need another clue.”

“Captain, please!” Hui was begging, broken. “Don’t do that.”

“You have to.” Lovelace’s voice was steely in the face of Hui’s begging. One of the things Elias respected the most about her: she would always do what needed to be done.

“ _Listen_ to him. I _can’t_.” Fourier sounded almost as broken as Hui was.

“And _you listen to me:_ Kuan Hui is one of the strongest people I’ve ever met. He’ll be fine, and if he isn’t, we’ll be there to get him through it. Now get me some hard data.”

A moment of silence, the sound of both Hui and Fourier breathing hard. Officer Lambert had often complained that their relationship was one that flouted regulations, but Elias had not realized to what extent until this moment. Perhaps that was something he should look into. They were technically his subordinates, and he had, just perhaps, been neglectful when it came to managing them.

“Eris. Give me another clue.” Fourier sounded tired. Defeated.

“With pleasure.” Out of the corner of his eye, Elias could see the AI—if that was what Eris was—smile wickedly as she sped Dr. Hui through another week.

“Kuan?” Fourier was clearly desperate to hear Hui speak, in a way that sent an unexpected pang through Elias.

“Please… no more…” Kuan’s voice was barely audible, a ghost of itself.

“Eris?” Lovelace demanded.

“The Captain took something precious from the person who killed him.”

There was a moment of silence. Elias wracked his brain, trying to put the pieces together.

“What the _hell_ are we supposed to do with that? Give us a real clue.”

“No, Captain!” Elias found himself capable of speaking again, the comms panel lighting on its own once more. “That’s good. Dr. Dyson, the biologist, killed him.”

“What? Was that why there was an explosion in the lab?” Lovelace asked.

“Wait, what?” Fourier interjected.

“Captain of the Valkyrie was about to terminate experiments,” Elias said, thinking what he might do if the same happened to him. Not over the specimens in his lab, of course, but if someone called an end to his work with Decima? He might be tempted to do something very terrible indeed. “Doctor could not allow that. Arranged for sample to be released. Got out of control.”

“Twenty seconds,” Eris said from where she had her head tucked against Elias’s shoulder.

“Wait, hang on, did you just say—?” Fourier interrupted.

“Selberg, are you sure?” Lovelace asked.

“Yes, captain.” As certain as he could be, with his own mind on the line.

Fourier was, apparently, still caught on something else, muttering beneath her breath.

“Doctor Dyson killed Captain Lorre?” Lovelace asked.

“Ten seconds. Final answer?” Eris responded, sounding smug, in a way that shook Elias’s confidence.

“No, wait!” Fourier shouted. “The second in command killed the Captain! With the bomb in the lab!”

“And… time.” Eris lifted her head from his shoulder, and Elias shuddered, waiting for her to carry through on her threat. But instead, there was a distant click, the sound of a door opening. “Lucky shot,” Eris said, sounding annoyed. “But… correct. You can go on to the next room.”

Elias found himself able to move again. He shoved hard against Eris, sent her tumbling away from him, sent his suddenly unmoored self flying towards the wall. She righted herself in the same eerie way she had before, coming to a complete halt in mid-air, facing him.

“What the _fuck_ was that about?” he snarled at her, clinging to one of the handholds on the wall, desperate to ground himself.

She brushed her hands down the front of her dress, flattening the already-neat skirt of it over her legs. “Temper, temper,” she said, quirking up one dangerous eyebrow.

“Eris, I am not in the mood to play games. What. Was. That. About?”

She shot him a coy look. “Which bit? The part where you almost lost your mind, or…”

“The… the other part,” he said breathlessly. “Why… why would you…”

She tilted her head to one side. “I told you. You’re a difficult nut to crack.” And then, without pushing off of anything, without seeming to _move_ , she was up close to him once more, nose-to-nose, eye-to-eye, so close he could feel her breath, warm against his face. Close enough to kiss, he found himself thinking, unwanted, unwarranted. “So I’m here to crack you,” she said, taking his jaw firmly in one hand.

Elias swallowed hard. “Why me?” he asked, his voice suddenly hoarse and catching in his throat. “I am not like the others. I stay clear of their petty disagreements as much as I can. I do the work that needs to be done.”

“That’s the problem.” Eris sounded almost as if she pitied him. “You do the work, but you’re not a team player, doctor. You hold yourself above and beyond them all.”

“I have to,” he said, feeling desperate now. “In order to do my work, I cannot allow myself to become attached to them. You _must_ know that.”

“And didn’t you do some of your best work because you had, as you say, become _attached_?” Eris’s eyes were very intent on his, as if trying to peer into the very core of his being, and Elias flinched away from that gaze, from those words, squeezing his eyes shut so that he would not have to see.

Yes, he had been very attached once. Attached to a woman who had never been anything but his lab manager, and so desperate to avoid her death that he had done something unforgivable.

“Dmitri…” Her voice was soft, and close, and so was every other part of her, and all he could do was _want_ , desperately, futilely, for this to somehow be another time and another place, for a chance to turn back time and change the course his life had taken.

“I could do that,” she said, her voice hardly more than a murmur. “But I think we’ll have to go a _bit_ further back than you’re expecting, if we want to see some real change.”

His eyes snapped open. “What… what does that mean?” he asked, his mouth dry, a thrill of terror, of _longing_ coursing through his veins.

Eris smiled. “Let me show you.”

Dmitri Vologin trudged homewards from his latest research meeting with his thesis advisor, glaring suspiciously up at the sky. It was going to snow. He could feel it. Bad enough that it snowed more than six months out of every year here in Saint Petersburg. The sky had no call to be threatening snow in the middle of September. Not that he was not used to snow, but he hated trudging through it, and he resented the fact that it looked as if he would have to start doing it before it was even properly winter.

“Dmitri! Wait up!”

A female voice called after him, and he turned his glare on the owner of it as the woman ran to catch up with him, her short, plump form bundled up against the cold, her wild curls blown this way and that by the wind, her warm brown skin made even darker by the flush of exertion.

“And what do you want?” he growled down at her as she fell into step at his side, recognizing her as another student in his graduate program but not remembering her name.

“My name is Eris,” she said, answering his unasked question with a smile. “And I want you.”

Elias felt a sudden jolt, and then he was himself once more. He stared wide-eyed at Eris. “What _was_ that?

“Physical limitations don't really limit me,” she said with a smirk. “They're more like challenges to be overcome. And I’m in a mood to challenge myself right now.”

“Yes, but that…” Elias let out a low hiss of breath. “That was not physical, that was… I remember that day. There was no one like you in my graduate program. I walked home alone that day.” And every other day. He hadn’t exactly been popular; he had been younger than most of his fellow doctoral candidates, and more intelligent, and arrogant with it.

And for the first time, he found himself wondering: what would those years have been like if he had not been so alone?

“Show me?” he asked, not even trying to hide the desperation in his voice.

A delighted smile spread across her face. “With pleasure.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Give me your arm,” Eris said as she fell in at his side.

Dmitri offered it without thinking. She tucked her hand through the crook of his elbow and kept pace with him as if this was something they did every day, and not a strange gesture from a woman he only had a passing familiarity with. “What is it you want again?” he asked.

“You,” she said, shooting him a swift sideways look that he did not understand.

“For… what? Study group?”

She laughed at that. “Absolutely not. We spend too much time working. I want to _play_.”

“With me.” Dmitri frowned. “I do not even know you. And what kind of a name is Eris?” He found himself irritable, confused by this woman’s presence. She could not possibly mean that she wanted to spend time with him. _This must be some kind of joke_ , he found himself thinking. No doubt one of the other graduate students had put her up to it. Or perhaps she had decided it would be fun to torment him all on her own.

“Eris is the goddess of chaos, strife, and discord.” She glanced up at Dmitri’s face again and clearly noticed his appalled look, or at least he assumed that was why she laughed. “It’s a joke. You’re always so set in your routine.” The grin on her face widened. “I thought I’d interrupt it.”

“And so you decided to call yourself Eris.”

“It’s as good a name as any,” she said carelessly.

Dmitri let out an annoyed huff of breath. “What _is_ your real name?”

She looked up at him again, pouting this time, her full lips forming a sweet little moue of annoyance that was distressingly appealing. “You don’t remember?”

He shook his head.

“Then you can call me…” She tapped her lower lip with the index finger of her free hand, contemplating. “Koschei.”

“Bessmertnyy?” He raised an eyebrow, disbelieving.

“One and the same.” Her grin was back, bright and startling, and Dmitri had to look away from her before he tripped over his own feet.

“I think I prefer Eris,” he muttered, disconcerted by this woman’s effect on him.

“If you prefer. It’s all one and the same to me.”

“You _could_ tell me your name.”

She laughed. If she was merely here because she thought it would be amusing to annoy him, clearly she was having an excellent time. “Well, where would be the fun in that?” she asked cheerfully. “You’re the forgetful one, not me. I remembered your name just fine.”

Dmitri scoffed, hiding the fact that he was terrible at names—and really should know hers, he had been in enough lectures with her—behind a show of disdain. “You must have terrible taste, if you want to spend time with a man who cannot even be bothered to remember your name,” he spat.

“Awful,” she said, continuing to sound cheerful. “I’m one of those people who can’t stand being _disliked_. Always want what I can’t have.”

Dmitri laughed, or tried to. No one wanted him. When the Volgograd meltdown had happened, most of the families with children had moved if they could afford to, and most of those who couldn’t had sent their children to willing relatives. But his parents had barely been able to afford to feed them all, and there had been no relatives who had wanted him or any of his siblings. So there in Volgograd he had stayed, until he was the only one left of his family, until the state had finally intervened, years too late for it to make a difference.

The state hadn’t particularly wanted him either, to be honest. He had been sent from one orphanage to another to another, none of them particularly keen on dealing with the health problems his years in Volgograd had caused, none of them particularly hopeful that they would be able to find a home for him.

His only salvation had been his mind.

And his mind said— _logic_ said—that this woman was toying with him.

“Do you know what they call me?” he spat nastily in her direction.

“Dukh,” she responded without hesitation.

“And do you know why they call me that?”

“Because the rumor is that you died in childhood, and are nothing but a vengeful ghost given solid form and sent to graduate school to torment them all,” she said, her voice still cheerful in the face of his nastiness. “You seem alive enough to me.”

“Says the woman who wishes me to call her after Bessmertnyy,” he found himself grumbling.

“Do I seem alive to you?”

Dmitri examined her out of the corner of his eye. Her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks were still flushed from the cold wind, her arm was warm against his. And not just her arm; he had unconsciously tucked her close to his side when she had slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, so her entire side was warm against his, the heat of her radiating even through the thick wool coat she wore.

“Alive enough, though perhaps as a ghost myself, I cannot recognize another shade when she comes to pester me.”

The woman—Eris, he decided to continue calling her for now—seemed to find this hysterical, though he had no inkling as to why. About as many people had ever found him hysterical as had wanted him.

“So?” Eris asked, a thread of humor warming her voice.

“So what?”

“So how about it?”

“How about...?”

“We go have some _fun_ together.”

“What an unnatural woman you are.” The words were rude and he knew it, but he could not understand why this woman was still doggedly at his side.

Eris laughed at that. “It’s 1968, and I’m a Black woman doing a doctoral degree in genetics and microbiology at a Russian university. There’s plenty that other people might consider unnatural about me before you get to me being interested in spending time with you.”

Other people, she had said. “And you? What do you consider unnatural about yourself?”

Her face lit up as she considered the subject. “Everything,” she said decisively after a moment’s thought. “And nothing. I’m me as I am. A whole person, flaws and contradictions and all.”

Dmitri let out a little huff of breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. Despite his caution, he found himself just a little bit charmed by this woman. “So why me? Why did you decide to interrupt my routine?”

She bit her lower lip, suddenly solemn. “Because I think that, just maybe, you spend too much time alone.”

A truth he tried to avoid because it always bit a little too deeply. “Why should you care?”

“People can get a bit strange if they’re too far removed from the rest of humanity.” There was a hint of some suppressed emotion he could not identify in her voice. Perhaps she herself felt too removed from the world, though given her open cheer, Dmitri could not imagine why she would.

“I still do not see how this is your problem to solve,” he muttered, tucking his hands deep into the pockets of his coat.

She adjusted her hand against his arm to stay tucked close to his side. “Perhaps it isn’t. And maybe you don’t want to solve it. But wouldn’t it be nice to just… just spend an evening where your only concern is having a bit of fun? When did you last have something _fun_ to look forward to, Dmitri?”

Those words cut a little too deep. Dmitri removed his hand from his pocket and shrugged her off. “I have plenty to look forward to. My doctoral research is going well...” He was brusque now, trying to chase her off without saying the words, because if he said the words she might actually go... and he could not quite bring himself to want her gone that badly.

“And I’m sure it’s a beauty of a retrovirus, but it’s not a person,” Eris said, still doggedly at his side.

Dmitri turned to glare at her. “How did you know my thesis project was on—“

“—retroviruses?” She raised an eyebrow. “How do you think? You’ve been a second author on three papers.”

“That is true.” He had not realized that anyone had actually read them, or, if they had, he had assumed that everyone would have ignored the presence of his name in the authors section entirely. “Why are you still here?”

“Do you want me to go away? I will, if you want it.”

This was the longest conversation that wasn’t related to his research that Dmitri had had in years. Literally years, he realized with a start. Perhaps other people had once tried to reach out to him, to offer him a place in their social lives, but he had been so focused...

“What... what _do_ people do for fun, these days?” he asked uncertainly.

Eris grinned mischievously up at him. “Well, we could go back to your apartment and…”

“No thank you. Other than that?”

She made a face. “You’re no fun.”

“I’m not quite ready to bring a strange woman home. What else is there?”

“Well,” she said, tilting her head to one side as she considered. “At our age? Drinking, mostly. Or dancing.”

“Then you can buy me a drink.”

“That’s supposed to be my line in this exchange, I think, but I was never very fond of societal norms.”

“And then you can take me dancing,” he added, raising an eyebrow at her.

“My punishment for talking too much, I take it,” she said, her face glowing with amusement. “And then?”

“And then nothing, you terrible woman.”

That grin of hers flashed bright across her face. “Let’s find a bar.”

Eris found them an establishment that offered both the drinking and the dancing she had promised him. He didn’t quite know what a night club was supposed to look like, but he thought this might be one.

“Dinner first?”

Dmitri patted his pockets absentmindedly. He was running through the very end of his stipend, but surely he could make it to the end of the month...

“I’m paying, of course,” Eris added, noticing his anxious move. “I’m not a complete monster.”

“You are not a monster at all.”

“I _am_ forcing you to come dancing with me.” Her eyes were sparkling with amusement now.

“Ah, I believe it is the other way around. I forced you to come dancing if you wished to spend time with me, remember?”

“Perhaps it was all a ploy to get you on the dance floor,” she shot back, her voice warm and affectionate. A waiter appeared at their side and lead them across the club to a table in a little nook, a set-up that was decidedly romantic in nature and even more decidedly unsettling with this woman he barely knew at his side.

“Whatever you want. It’s my treat, after all,” she said when he picked up the menu.

The food on offer wasn’t much different from what he cooked for himself in his poky, single-room apartment. He chose borscht, because it was the product of more hours of labor than he usually felt like putting in for a meal, and at his companion’s prompting, potato pancakes and dumplings, two dishes she liberally stole from as they ate.

“And now, the drink. Vodka?”

“What else?”

Eris smiled and muttered something that he thought was “Oh, you Russians,” as she summoned the waiter and ordered what turned out to be a remarkably smooth and palatable version of the clear, burning beverage he was accustomed to.

Her drink was brown and smelled as if it could have been used to sterilize lab equipment.

By then, a band had started playing, and she pulled him to his feet and dragged him down to the dance floor, first teaching him how to do a very correct foxtrot and following that with what seemed to be an extremely inappropriate shimmy and twist.

“I think I need another drink,” he told her after that. Several other couples had taken to the dance floor by then, and he was just a little too socially awkward to keep dancing without something to keep him from overthinking things.

“All right. More vodka?”

“What was it that you were drinking?”

Eris laughed. “Nothing I would particularly recommend.”

“Oh, I must try it now.”

The mysterious brown liquid turned out to be a dirt cheap whiskey that scoured his throat and left him coughing from just a sip. Eris giggled at him and took the glass out of his hand, downing the remaining finger or so of alcohol in one swift swallow.

“That was vicious,” he wheezed. “I will return to vodka.”

“Then let’s order a bottle.” Eris said with a smile before doing just that. “Tell me about yourself,” she said as they waited, leaning over the little table that was now home base for them and tweaking the collar of his shirt straight.

“Well, as you apparently know, my doctoral research is in retroviruses—“

She cut him off with a burst of laughter. “Not about your research. I want to know about _you_.”

What was there to him other than his research? Dmitri didn’t know.

Eris seemed to think he needed further prompting. “What is it that you want more than anything else?”

He knew immediately what it was, but no, such an answer was too honest and vulnerable for a conversation with a woman he barely knew. “To… to go to outer space,” he offered up instead.

“Mm, quite the goal. The Soviet program is a good ten years behind the rest of the world, you know.”

“We will catch up,” Dmitri insisted.

Eris leaned her elbow on the table and propped her chin in her hand. “Of course, if you want the really promising space programs, you’ll want to go into the private sector. I hear Wright-Goddard has quite the program. Three deep-space stations, _and_ they just launched a construction crew and the components for a station in the direction of Procyon.”

Dmitri perked up. “I had not heard that. How far away is Procyon?”

“Just about 11 and a half lightyears.”

The thought of being 11 and a half lightyears away from the rest of humanity had its appeal.

Eris smiled at him. “You look like I just gave you a present.”

“I like outer space.” The bottle of vodka had arrived at some point while Eris had been talking about Goddard’s space program, and Dmitri poured himself a glass.

“You like the thought of running away.”

“No!” he protested. “No. Would simply like a bit of space. Room to do what I wish. Less… oversight.” He blushed, hiding it by taking a sip of vodka.

“Mm, maybe I really ought to be asking more questions about your research. That sounds awfully shifty.” Eris raised an eyebrow at him, and Dmitri made an incoherent sound of protest before realizing that she was teasing him.

“Not shifty,” he said, feeling as if he needed to explain himself. “Simply…” He sighed. “It all comes back to Volgograd,” he said quietly. “It all comes back to… to watching everyone around me die by inches, and to a government that did not care to intervene until it was too late for everyone. If I could make sure that such a thing never happens again, I would. But I cannot think how it could be done, not without…”

“Not without some sacrifices being made along the way,” Eris finished for him.

“Yes.” Dmitri downed the rest of his glass of vodka, and poured a second. “And so I wonder. Does the death of a few matter in the face of the survival—no, in the face of the prosperity of the many?”

“Hard to say.” Eris filled her own glass and took a sip. “On a global level, perhaps not. But could you bring yourself to know a person, to kill them, and to tell them that they’re dying for the greater good?”

The thought gave Dmitri cold shudders. He hadn’t been born until the end of the war, but the memory of it was still seared into the collective consciousness of the world. “That sounds like…”

“The sort of logic they used, certainly, if twisted from what you intend.”

“Yes. And as to the question you ask… I do not know.”

They sat silently, listening to the music from the band and nursing their glasses of vodka through two more refills, the mood between them decidedly gloomy.

Eris set her glass down with a decisive click the next time it was empty. “Let’s dance.”

Dmitri let her pull him to the dance floor where she taught him more dance moves, some even more inappropriate than that shimmy and twist. By now, he was clumsy with alcohol and drunk enough to not care, and every deliberate touch Eris placed on his body left him giddy.

No one touched him these days. Not on purpose. And certainly not like this, warm fingers wrapped around his wrist as she repositioned his hand a little higher on her waist, knees brushing against his as she lead him through steps, a tap to the bare skin of his chest, where at some point in the evening he had unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, overheated in the warmth of the club.

“Want to go to my apartment?” she asked, hours later, her head tucked against his shoulder as they swayed tiredly on the dance floor.

“Yes.” It was a foolish thing to do, and he knew it, knew it was the alcohol that was making it easy to say that word. But he could not bring himself to care. He released her, somewhat reluctantly, and turned to make his way back to their table and coats.

Eris was not behind him when he reached the table. He glanced back the way he had come with a frown. Was this it, then? Had she had all of her fun and decided to abandon him now?

No. She had been accosted by a man—tall, sharply dressed, his hair very neat and his gaze predatory—and seemed to be having some kind of argument with him. After a moment, she seemed to sense Dmitri’s eyes on her. She turned her head to look at him and shook it once, decisively, staying Dmitri in his resolve to rush back to her side. After a moment, she seemed to gain the upper hand in the argument she had been having, and the man backed away, his hands held up defensively, a mocking smile on his face.

“It’s on your head, my dear,” the stranger called after her, his voice surprisingly clear over the music.

“What was that about?” Dmitri asked.

The corner of Eris’s mouth twisted into a frown. “Oh, nothing important. Just… an acquaintance. We had a little disagreement about whether my priorities are in the right order.”

Dmitri found himself frowning as well, indignant on her behalf. “If he is only an acquaintance, what right does he have to judge your priorities?”

She gave him a grateful smile. “Thank you. I feel much better now that you’ve come to my defense.”

He blushed under the force of that smile and busied himself with his winter gear, wrapping his scarf just so.

The air outside the club was freezing, though there was no sign yet of the snow Dmitri had thought the sky had been threatening earlier that afternoon. Eris blew out a great puff of breath and smiled when it showed in the cold air. “Like a dragon,” she said.

“Ridiculous woman.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.” She tucked her arm through his once more, leading him down the street. “I’m just up this way.”

Her apartment was nicer than his was. Or at least, it had multiple rooms, even if the rooms were small, and an adequate amount of furniture to go in them, and an old radiator in the main room that managed to more-or-less heat the place despite the horrifying groaning noises that emanated from it.

Eris shrugged out of her coat and threw it over the back of a chair, and Dmitri followed suit… and then he crowded in close to her, sliding his arms around her waist and pulling her close. She tilted her head back and met his awkward kiss with experience, and he kissed her again and again, the taste of the vodka they had been drinking still strong on her breath but not quite strong enough to hide the warm, delicious humanity beneath.

“Is this what you wanted to come back to my apartment to do?” he asked breathlessly, unable to move further away than his forehead pressed to hers even though they weren’t kissing any more.

“Well, I was thinking we’d spend some time talking first,” she said, sounding a bit indignant. “But yes.”

He let out a sigh. “And what happens now?”

She nuzzled him gently. “It’s late. We go to bed.”

Dmitri felt his eyes widen involuntarily, his head jerking up in surprise. “I—“

“To sleep, darling,” she said, her voice kind. “You’re a little too drunk for anything else.” She tweaked the point of his shirt collar. “So am I.”

“Do you want me to leave?” He asked the question anxiously, suddenly not ready for this evening to end.

Eris looked up at him with wide, dark eyes, her own anxiety obvious. “Do you want to?”

He shook his head, and that anxiety on her face lapsed into relief.

They stood there cuddling a little longer, with Eris accepting a few more kisses from him and then a few more after that, but eventually she pulled herself away from him. “Let’s go to bed. Want a nightgown?”

“Does it get cold in here?” Dmitri asked as he followed her into the apartment’s pokey bedroom.

“Sometimes.”

“Do your nightgowns do anything about the cold?”

She grinned over her shoulder at him as she rummaged through a drawer. “Some of them.”

“I will take one of those, then, if you have one to spare.”

She bundled him into her bathroom to change, along with a voluminous flannel nightgown and a spare toothbrush, and laughed when he emerged again. “You look properly like a ghost now.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Thank you.”

“Go back to bed. I’ll join you shortly.” But she pulled him down to her as he passed her by, just to press a warm kiss to his cheek, and Dmitri felt a swift pain within his chest, the hard thump of a heart not used to such unconscious affection.

He was asleep before she returned.

Dmitri slept dreamlessly.

He woke in the morning with a foul taste in his mouth and a vague headache, confused at first by the fact that his pillow seemed to be far warmer than the heat of his face could have made it. And then he remembered, lifting his head to look at the woman whose shoulder he had been sleeping on.

Eris was still asleep herself, her mouth hanging open, a little whispery snore emanating from it, and Dmitri could not resist. He lifted himself further, up onto his elbow, and leaned in, pressing a brief, careful kiss to her upper lip.

The whispery snore stopped. Eris opened her eyes and yawned before grinning lazily up at him. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” he responded. “Your real name is Marya.”

She laughed at that. “Well, you’re getting warmer.”

“It is not?”

“Marya will do, if you want to use it for me.”

Dmitri frowned. “Damn. I thought I had it.” He brushed another kiss against her, placing this one on the tip of her nose. “I will continue to call you Eris for now.”

She yawned again. “Fine with me.”

The evening before, she had been glamorous, her face well made-up, a giant pouf of curls crowning her head, the plump curves of her body draped in a soft and silky dress. This morning, she was decidedly the opposite, all glamour gone, those curls wrapped away in a drab cloth, the makeup removed, her body covered collarbones to ankles in a flannel nightgown not too dissimilar from the one she had offered him.

She felt even more of a stranger to him now than she had last night, but now he realized that he wanted to _know_ her, if only because she seemed to want to know him. Just as he could not remember the last time someone had touched him on purpose, he could not remember when someone had last cared to ask about Dmitri the person before Dmitri the student.

“What is it that _you_ want more than anything else?” he blurted out.

Eris smiled at him and bit her lower lip, obviously considering. “I... I want to be free,” she said quietly, her seemingly ever-present smile disappearing from her face and leaving her somber. “I want to be able to make my own decisions, and to not feel like every day is pulling me down a path I can’t help but walk.”

“Do you feel as if you are trapped in your life, then?” Dmitri asked, stroking a finger down her cheek.

Eris was smiling again, a smile that seemed forced even though her features were a little blurry without his glasses. “Of course not.”

“Hm. A lie, I think.”

Eris raised an eyebrow, and the painful smile turned into a grin that read as decidedly saucy despite the blurriness. “Not that you can prove.”

“Must I prove it for it to be true?”

“Aren’t you a scientist?”

“Yes.” Dmitri considered. “But I am not certain that any part of human thought or emotion can be studied empirically.”

“Perhaps not on a group level,” Eris said, her tone thoughtful, “but I find that most individuals are fairly predictable when it comes to cause and effect. A little touch here...” and at that she reached out and traced a finger along Dmitri’s collarbone, which protruded above the wide neckline of the nightgown he had borrowed from her, “...and another one there...” her finger trailed its way up the tendon in his neck, back down the line of his jaw to the tip of his chin, which she tapped decisively, “...and who knows what reactions you might get?”

Dmitri lifted himself onto an elbow and leaned in her direction. “Kisses,” he said, before planting one on her laughing mouth.

One kiss turned into two turned into more, and Dmitri found himself wondering what he would do if she offered more of herself than this. Not that it would happen, of course. She was… and he was…

Hairless. Skinny. Myopic. Short. No growth spurts for Dmitri Vologin. His father had been a giant of a man, well over six feet tall; his mother had been almost as large. Dmitri had barely surpassed the average height for women in Russia.

Eris pulled back from him with a frown on her face. “What is it?”

Dmitri had not realized his train of thought was so evident. “Nothing. I just…”

“You just?” She raised a curious eyebrow.

“I do not understand why someone who looks like you would bother with me.”

“Dmitri…” She reached for him, and he jerked away from her, afraid of how her touch made him feel. Like he might be worth something to her, when he knew that the only worth he had was what the products of his mind might someday bring to the world.

“I am damaged,” he said, the words wrenching themselves from his throat. “I am damaged and I will _never_ be anything else. I am not…”

Eris pushed up on her elbow, looking down at him with a little frown between her eyebrows. “Not what?”

“Not the sort of person someone like _you_ should be interested in.”

“Is it so hard to believe that I might be interested in you as you are?” she asked, cuddling up against his side again.

“Yes.” Dmitri sighed as she nuzzled his cheek, a gentle touch that he did not deserve.

“Why?”

“Because no one else has ever been.”

“Why should that matter now?”

His jaw clenched and he looked away, towards the far wall of her room.

“Dmitri…” Her voice was soft, her breath warm against his ear. “If you don’t want to be here…”

“It is not that.”

“What, then? What do you want?” Eris pressed a kiss to his temple and wrapped a warm, heavy arm around his chest.

The question was an uncomfortable echo of the one she had asked the night before, and the moment was so strange, so intimate, that he found himself turning to look her in the eye as he gave her the answer he had shied away from the night before. “I want my family back.”

Her eyes softened. “Don’t we all.” She stroked her hand down his arm, patted his hand where it rested on his stomach. “Still, even if there’s no getting them back... nothing stopping you from making a new one.”

“There is everything stopping me. I cannot even...” But no. Even if his impotence was a fact of his life, there was no reason to tell Eris about it.

Eris didn’t seem to care where that sentence had been going. “Family isn’t just people we’re related to. Sometimes it’s the people we choose.”

“No one has ever cared to make me family.”

“And what about you? Have you reached out to other people?”

Dmitri opened his mouth to protest that he had, and sighed instead. “No.”

“Well, there’s the first step.”

“I have not known anyone I would want to have as family.”

“Not even me?” Eris asked, the grin on her face indicating that she was teasing him. “I’m wounded.”

“Especially not you. You are a dreadful woman,” he muttered. But his mind clouded over with thoughts of missed opportunities, and he found himself wondering: had he truly never wished to make a family of his own? A family, not of blood but of people who chose one another anyway?

“And you’ve only just met me. It’s not as if you really know me.” She paused and grinned, a naughty little grin that made his heart skip a beat. “Yet.”

Dmitri took her hand in his and smiled. “Is that a promise?”

She laughed. “More like a threat.”

“Dreadful, dreadful woman,” he murmured, lifting his head from the pillow in order to kiss her on the tip of the nose.

“A dreadful woman who is about to kiss you until she’s chased all those silly thoughts out of your head.”

She did, kissing him until they were both breathless and laughing, until kisses no longer held as much appeal as just holding one another did. Dmitri found himself laying there again with his head against her shoulder, his eyes shut, more content than he could ever remember being. And he wanted to do the same for her, if he could.

“Eris?”

“Mm?” She yawned. “Oh, excuse me.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Right now? Nothing more than you’re already doing.”

“It is simply…”

“Hush, Dmitri.” She pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “You’re enough.”

“I have never been enough before.”

“You’ve always been enough for me.”

He opened his eyes to look at her and found her gaze very intent on his, a strange expression on her face, sadness and anger and longing all intertwined. He opened his mouth to ask her what was wrong, what she had meant by _always_ , what—

There was a flash, and a jolt, and he was Elias Selberg once more.


	3. Chapter 3

“What was that?” Elias looked around in confusion. He was no longer in his lab, or in that imaginary apartment; around him was a dark void, devoid of color and shape and distance. “Where are we?”

Eris made a pained noise at his side, and he turned to find her doubled over, panting for breath, a voiceless scream of anguish on her face.

He reached for her. “Eris?”

She pulled back from him. “No!” Her voice was a breathless shout, full of pain. “I’ve just… I’ve just been pushing up against the limits of my programming.” She snapped her fingers and they were back in his lab. “Sorry about that.”

He reached for her once more, taking her carefully by the elbows and trying to ignore the way she shook and shivered under his touch. “Did... did that _hurt_ you?”

She tilted her head to one side, looking up at him through Rosemary’s wide eyes, little lines of pain still creasing her face. “Get the man a prize,” she spat sarcastically. “Of course it hurt me.”

Elias stared at her, aghast. “Why would you do this if it is hurting you? What is the point of it?”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

He shook his head, feeling lost. He had no idea why she would even _care_ what happened to him, if a machine could be said to care about things.

She let out a harsh laugh. “All that intellect, and no intelligence to go with it.”

“Now, that is not fair, suka,” he said, the insult—the endearment—slipping out before he could think better of it.

It was clear from the look on Eris’s face that she knew it was both, that the person he was talking to wasn’t really her, but the woman whose face she was still wearing. “Figure it out on your own, Dmitri. I’m not going to hold your hand through this,” she snapped.

He let her go, and she took a deep breath and smoothed her hands down the front of her dress, a motion he had gathered by now was her way of collecting herself.

“The others. How are they?” he asked, trying to find some topic of conversation to lighten the mood.

Eris raised an amused eyebrow. “Still working on room two.”

It had felt like nearly a day on his end. “Did you set them such a strenuous task?”

“It’s been about five minutes for them.” She smirked at his shocked expression. “Subjective temporal perspective. One of my favorite party tricks.”

“Like with Dr. Hui.”

“More or less.” She seemed calmer now, and in less pain. “You ready? I think I’m good to give it another try.”

Elias sighed and shook his head. “I do not understand what you were trying to do with that, unless you were trying to say that I should have kissed more strange women in my youth. And that does not seem like it would have been a very productive course of action.”

Eris made a face at him. “If that’s all you got from all of that, I’m not sure you were paying attention.”

“I am not certain how you expected me to pay attention to anything else, when you look like… like that.” He trailed off, suddenly embarrassed by his own words, by the thoughts that had preceded them. He had, for a moment, thought of her as only Rosemary, and had almost betrayed that thought out loud, had almost betrayed that damn _attraction_ that had lasted for so many years, that it seemed he wasn’t rid of, even now that the woman herself had been gone for more than a decade.

And Eris was clearly aware of where his train of thought had taken him.“Ah, yes. _That._ ” She smiled lopsidedly and tilted her head in acknowledgement. “We should probably have a conversation about that.”

“Why? It is not as if you are her.” He crossed his arms across his chest, a defensive move. “Or should I start calling _you_ Rosemary?”

To his surprise, Eris flinched, in a way very familiar to him, in the way he did every time she had called him Dmitri. “That won’t be necessary,” she said primly. “But let’s go examine that matter. I think it will be _quite_ productive.”

Before he could react, the world changed around him once more.

“Sleeping on the job?” Rosemary’s amused voice startled Karl awake, and he almost overbalanced as he sat up too fast in his desk chair, sending it flying backwards on its wheels. Rosemary’s hand caught the chair firm and fast by the back, stilling him in his backwards flight. “You realize, Dr. Kelley, that this sort of thing is why I was in here at midnight last night, telling you this could wait until morning? You’re getting a little old for sleeping on your desk.”

Karl grunted and stretched, wincing. “Was on verge of breakthrough.”

“Mm-hm. And tell me, did the breakthrough happen?”

Karl looked away, not bothering to answer.

“What I thought.” Rosemary perched a pair of virulent green reading glasses on her nose and scooped up the pile of notes he had been sleeping on, flipping through them. “This looks like a load of nonsense.”

“Please, must you insult me first thing in morning?”

“You can have an insult-free morning or you can have coffee,” Rosemary said in a distracted tone, pointing at a mug on the corner of his desk. “Choose carefully.”

“Will take the coffee and insults,” he responded, picking the mug up. The contents were just cool enough to drink and rich with cream and sugar. More kindness than he deserved from a woman who protected him so well already.

“You have spoken with Carter?” he asked in a careful, conversational tone as he cradled the mug in his hands. After the failure of his first human trial, the man had been irritated; Karl did not like to think how the volatile Head of Communications had reacted to the failure of this second trial.

“Yes,” Rosemary said, still distracted by the notes she was scanning.

“And?”

She lowered the notes and glanced over the top of her reading glasses at him. “And you get to keep Decima.”

Karl let out a tense breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “I thought...”

Rosemary laughed, a tired little sound. “Carter might be a bastard, but even he realizes that this sort of thing takes time. This was only the second human trial, and a less-than-ideal subject.”

A subject who had concealed a history of chest colds and sinus infections, a weak respiratory system not made evident by his physical that had lead to his swift and brutal death.

But perhaps less swift and brutal than the death that would have faced him in the general prison population, where he had been headed before Goddard had offered him a way out. Those who had harmed children the way that man had seldom lasted long under such circumstances.

“Still... I could have compensated somehow.” Karl sighed and studied Rosemary as he sipped at his coffee, watching her work her way through his notes from the night before. Her brow scrunched into a frown every once in a while, no doubt the result of the times he had lapsed into Russian cursive.

Her eyes were ringed in dark circles that betrayed a mostly sleepless night of her own; she had done her best to cover them with makeup, but there was only so much makeup could do. He was certain that Carter had threatened to take Decima away from him, and just as certain that those dark circles indicated hours spent arguing Carter around to keeping Karl on the project. And there was no way for him to thank her for it; if he outright asked her for confirmation that such a thing had happened, she would deny it; if he tried to do her a favor as recompense she would refuse it. Kindly, but a refusal all the same.

And all the while, she would call that kindness her job.

Perhaps it was only a job to her, but from his point of view their interactions had long ago ceased to be those of coworkers. Strange to call a woman he couldn’t fully trust his friend, but she was.

 _Perhaps more_ , his sleep-addled brain suggested. He took another sip of the coffee to quiet it.

That voice had been speaking up more and more, these past months. Rosemary had worked at his side, had taken the place of his usual lab assistants for the length of these first two human trials, and he had seen a different side to her as they had gone on. He had seen compassion for those who were not worthy of it, had seen...

She had protected him. Had kept him safe from Carter’s wrath when the first human trial had failed in less than a month, and safer still after this disaster of a second trial. And he had seen the strain of it on her face, in her movements, had heard it in the rasp of her voice and the hitch of her breath.

And blyad, but he wanted to care for her in return. A foolish thought, but one that kept returning. She usually kept herself so distant from _everyone_ , himself included, but right now… right now he wondered if she really wanted it to be that way.

“Well,” she said, setting the papers back on his desk, dropping her reading glasses back to her chest on their chain. “Well,” she said again, and sighed.

“I know. It feels like...” Karl let out a low, frustrated hiss of breath, his mind back on the work. “It does not feel like. It is starting over.”

“Not from scratch, at least,” she said with another tired laugh on her lips.

“But close enough.”

“Yes, well...” Rosemary bit her lower lip and rested her hand on the notes, tapping them with a fingernail. “Finish the data analysis first. There might be something in there that you can use.” She looked him up and down, a little frown of concern between her eyebrows. “But take the rest of today off first. Take a bath. And _get some sleep_. In your own bed, and not in a cot. You haven’t had much if a chance for that sort of thing these past few weeks.”

For some reason, the kindness in her voice made him angry. Not at her, but certainly on her behalf. Here she was, no doubt just as exhausted as he was, clearly planning to spend the rest of the day hard at work with no thought for her own well-being and no expectation that anyone else would care for it either.

He set the mug he had been cradling aside and hauled himself stiffly to his feet, glaring down at her. “And what about you, suka? You have spent as many hours far from your bed as I have.”

“I’m used to it.” Rosemary’s smile, usually bright and uncompromising, wavered at the corners and then disappeared entirely.

“That does not mean that you do not deserve relief from it.” Karl reached for her, pulled her to him, in one stumbling step that she did not resist taking.

From a distance of inches, those dark circles were very dark indeed.

“Well aren’t you a little touchy-feely today,” Rosemary said breathlessly, a strained little squeak to the words. “What—“

He did not let her finish the question.

A kiss might not be exactly the way he had intended to shut her up, but it worked all the same.

It had to be exhaustion, that made him behave that way.

It had to be exhaustion, that made her kiss him back.

They broke apart on a sigh, her breath feathering warmly across his lips. Karl found himself unwilling to pull further away than his forehead, pressed to hers.

“Well, that was... certainly something,” Rosemary said in a tart little voice that made Karl chuckle.

“We are both tired, I think.”

“Yes.”

“Should I apologize?”

“For being tired?”

“For kissing you.”

Rosemary took a step back, and he felt strangely unbalanced. “No apologies necessary. Just don’t do that again, hm?”

“Da.” He took a step back of his own, the space between them still feeling too small, his body still feeling that gravitational pull towards hers. “But if I have been working too much, then so have you.”

A wry smile ghosted its way across Rosemary’s face. “I can’t just abandon the labs.”

“No, you cannot, can you?” Not a thing she had ever been capable of, not in the time he had known her.

“Ah, well. Plenty of time to rest when I’m dead.” She was trying to be humorous, he could tell, but her voice came out brittle and guarded instead.

 _Let me take care of you_ , he wanted to shout. _Let me be your family._

He shied away from that thought.

But why not? Why not say those words?

“Let someone else take care of it all,” he rasped, holding his hand out to her. “You have taken care of me these past weeks. Let me take care of you for a while, hm?”

Any other place, he thought, and that would not have even had a chance of working. Even here it wasn’t exactly appropriate... but the line between work life and personal life was already so thin, here at Goddard Futuristics. When the pair of them lived in the apartments on Goddard’s campus, when late nights in the lab building turned them towards conversations that had nothing to do with their jobs, when he knew her patterns and habits almost as well as his own.

Her eyes softened, just for a moment.

She took his hand.

There was a knock on the frame of his office door.

“Could I have a word?” Mr. Carter asked.

Another flash, another jolt, and Elias was in that dark void with Eris at his side once again. A low keening noise escaped her throat, like a wounded animal.

“Eris—“

“No!” she panted, pushing him away.

“Let me—“

She clearly had no time for Elias. She turned away from him, shouting into the void, breathless and furious. “I’m trying to fix him! You want him functional or not?”

A little pop, and the form of Marcus Cutter materialized in front of them. “I don’t care what you’re trying to do. It’s taking your attention away from the others.”

“They’ll never notice,” Eris said, her chin firming stubbornly as she stared Cutter down. “You said it would be on my head if I decided to do this, so _let_ me!”

“They may not have noticed, but I _have_. You’re putting _quite_ the strain on your processors with this little side project.”

Cutter paused and picked an invisible piece of lint off his suit, a theatrical gesture meant to keep all eyes on him, deliberately ignoring Eris’s mutter of “So why don’t you turn yourself off, then,” as he did. 

“Dr. Selberg knows his place, and he’ll stay there just fine without your interference.” He glanced at Elias with cold, hard eyes. “Won’t you, doctor?”

Elias felt as if he were frozen in place, some small mammal fixed in the gaze of a predator.

“But he could be so much more.” Eris cried. Her plea seemed to fall on deaf ears, but it touched Elias that she was pleading for him.

“I. Don’t. Care.” Cutter turned that cold predatorial gaze on Eris. “You’re getting too invested in this, my dear. He is not your priority. Don’t make me do this again.”

With another pop of displaced air, Cutter was gone and Elias was back in his lab.

He was alone.

“I never would have done that,” Elias said to the thin air, just in case Eris was listening in. “I never would have kissed her like that. Never would have offered…” He trailed off, remembering the way things had actually been. That day Eris had shown him, he had even ignored Rosemary’s request that he go back to his apartment and take the day off. They had discussed his notes—an exhausted, fruitless conversation, the pair of them cudgeling too-tired brains into action they resented—and then he had spent the rest of the day on analysis of the autopsy results, on a further review of his notes, of the tests he had done over the course of both trials.

He put his hand to his mouth.

It had been... very real, that vision. The drinking and dancing with Eris, that he could dismiss as a fantasy, but that had been with a stranger, not with the woman he had known so well in the years they had worked together. But this had been Rosemary, the brittle and brilliant woman he had… he had…

Would he have tried, if he had known Rosemary would have received it well?

But Eris could not have known how Rosemary would have taken such actions. If Rosemary’s reaction had been the one he wanted, it must have been entirely _because_ that was what he wanted. If she wore Rosemary’s body, Rosemary’s _face_ , it could only be because she wished to distress and disorient him, even if…

Even if the version of Rosemary that Eris was using was some thirty years younger than any version of Rosemary he had ever known.

How much of Eris was Miranda Pryce’s programming, anyway?

Could Rosemary, the Rosemary he remembered, the Rosemary it had almost destroyed him to lose… could she somehow be a part of this too?

His mind was racing, remembering an event he had set aside as unimportant. Miranda Pryce with some sort of _device_ , visiting Rosemary during her final days, saying that if _he_ was not going to save Rosemary, it was her turn to give it a try. But nothing had come from that… had it? He knew how much storage space an AI’s personality core took; how much more, to save a person? Would the technology of the time have been sufficient? Would they have thought it worthwhile, to save the person as a whole and not just the parts of her that were _useful_?

Questions he had no answers to, and questions he was desperate to have answered.

There was a soft pop of displaced air.

“Eris?” he asked, not daring to turn, afraid that if he did he would meet Mr. Cutter’s cold eyes instead.

“It’s me,” Eris said.

He released his tension on a sigh. “I—“

“Can’t ask me those things, darling,” she said, brittle and guarded, a tone of voice so like Rosemary’s that he could not imagine it was anyone but her behind him.

“But you _are_ her, aren’t you.” He turned to look at her, found her tired and defeated, reached for her without thinking. She let him pull her to him, let him tuck her head beneath his chin, let him hold her.

“I’m a ghost, Dmitri,” she said, bitter and tired. “If I’m her, I’m only the worst bits. Every bit of her that was most like _him_ …”

He knew she must be talking about Cutter. “People change, over time.” He cupped the back of her neck in his hand, kissed her temple. “I am the worst parts of the Dmitri Vologin who once was. Perhaps she would have become like you over the years. Goddard is skilled at turning us into the worst versions of ourselves, is it not?”

She let out a pained laugh. “Can you imagine better?”

“I...” he trailed off. For himself, he could not, not without undoing the fundamental nature of who he was. Those early years in Volgograd, watching his family die around him, watching Volgograd die around him... they had shaped a Dmitri Vologin who had found Decima, who had been determined to bend it to his will. They had shaped that young man who had made his work his entire life, who had never gone drinking and dancing, who had never made himself a new family, because they would have only gotten in the way.

He had always been headed down this path. Goddard Futuristics had only sped his journey.

For Rosemary... he could only guess at what had made her what she was.

“Can you?” he asked her in return.

She pushed herself back from him and studied his face for a long, quiet moment. And then she shook her head. “No. But that’s a limit of my programming.”

“My imagination has never been that good.”

She smiled, and traced the line of his cheekbone with a fingertip. “Your imagination has always been more than good enough for what you needed it for. Who else would imagine that a retrovirus could change the world?”

A sudden fine mist of tears filled his eyes, clouding his vision. “But not soon enough to save the people I loved.” The word slipped out, a word he had never admitted to himself, let alone out loud.

He had loved Rosemary.

A handkerchief materialized in her hand and she pushed his glasses aside in order to dab the tears off his cheeks. “You were never going to save Rosemary.”

“I could have—“

“No, Dmitri.” Eris gave him a pitying look. “She was too far gone before you ever met her. Keller sank his claws in deep when he got ahold of her, and he was never going to let her go.” A weak smile ghosted its way across her face. “Not even after death. Not even now that he’s had a half-dozen names and faces in the time between.”

Elias pulled her close again, buried his face against her neck and took a deep breath. This much, he could remember. The smell of lavender soap and jojoba oil that always drifted along in Rosemary’s wake. The press of her body against his must have been extrapolated from a hundred thousand small touches over time, from the times she had leaned past him, into him, as they worked around one another in his lab and office, but he could find nothing unreal about it. Memories, precious and his, so easily lost and broken and forgotten.

“Would you have done it?” he heard himself ask. “If Dr. Fourier had not found the solution to your riddle, would you have taken my mind?”

“Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to start over?” Her fingertips traced small circles on his scalp, and Elias suspected that she had avoided a real answer on purpose.

“Yes.” He tugged Eris closer, keeping his face tucked against her neck, his lips warm on her skin. “But not so much that I could bear giving up my work for it. I have lost too much on the path to where I am today.” _Not so much that I could bear giving her up_ , were the words he could not bring himself to voice. Not when memories were all he had left.

“You wouldn’t remember. That’s the point.”

“But I would know.” It was his turn to lift his head, to study her close and careful. For some reason, she was using Rosemary’s face as he had known it, with deep brackets at the corners of her mouth from too many fake smiles, with crows feet at the corners of her eyes, so dear to him and so dearly missed for all of these years. “I would know,” he said again, “Because something would always be missing.”

There, a certain softness around her eyes. There, a certain wry twist to her mouth.

And then she was gone once more.

Tears leaked hot and fast as he tried to imagine a different end than this for the pair of them.

If he could not imagine even that much, then what hope was there for his future?


	4. Chapter 4

Even with Eris gone, Elias found himself drifting, unmoored from the present moment, drowning in memories, in a hundred thousand little moments that meant nothing, that meant _everything_. Around him, a facsimile of his lab aboard the Hephaestus, cold and dark and empty and ignored.

Could he imagine better than those memories? Could he change them, change _himself_? Would he be better than he was, if he could?

He tried. Tried to imagine that his futile love had been reciprocated, that Rosemary had wanted him too, that if she had, it was because of who he was, not in spite of it. Tried to imagine… what, that he had met her long ago, when it might have made a difference for both of them? Before he had grown into the sort of man who had made _that_ choice, the sort of man who had been so desperate upon discovering that Rosemary was dying that he had offered her Decima, before she had become the sort of woman who would say yes?

Such imaginings were no use. Rosemary had died. He had _killed_ her.

But… whatever she had felt for him, she had always pushed past his stubborn disdain for other people with stubbornness of her own. And she had not needed to push very hard. Elias had never known how to react to her. Not to her smiles, not to her intelligence… and not to the way she tore into him and his research, forcing him to break everything down into its constituent parts and reexamine every assumption, an approach that so often had lead to fresh epiphanies when he had no idea where to go next.

And definitely not to her flirting, as meaningless as he had always thought it.

“It has been harder without you,” he said out loud, yet another admission he had been avoiding. “I have not… I should never have agreed to use Officer Fisher. But progress has been so slow without you, Rosemary.” Tears were obscuring his vision now, and he swiped them away roughly. “I no longer have anyone to talk to. Not the way we talked.” The words were tumbling out of his mouth now, faster and faster. “I never should have offered Decima to you. I should have been there. I should have been at your side, even if all you would let me be was a friend. I should have…”

The words choked off in his throat. _I should have loved you the way you deserved to be loved. I should have cared for you the way I knew no one else cared._

How many years had Decima been the only thing in his heart before he had come to Goddard Futuristics? How was it only now, when he was old and aching and lost, that he had come to question it?

How could he do anything else but move forward?

How could he move forward when his mind was still stuck in his past?

“Maybe I did you a disservice, going into your past like that.” Eris’s voice echoed in his ear. “I didn’t realize…”

“Please.” He could not voice what he was asking for with that word, but he said it again, harsh and desperate, reduced to begging. “ _Please_.”

Eris understood.

There was a flash, a jolt, and he was somewhen else once more.

Marius Vandersee paced his lab, one end to the other, again and again. Eventually, he abandoned the pacing for a bottle brush and the racks of test tubes that had been waiting for a lab tech to scrub them. The rote motions of cleaning lab equipment and preparing it for sterilization soothed him, gave him space to work through the shock of that morning, that had so thoroughly thrown his thoughts out of alignment such that even now he could not sit still, could not think, could not…

He paused for a moment, up to his elbows in soapy water, his eyes squeezed shut so tightly that lights flashed behind the lids.

Rosemary was dying.

He had come back from his first rotation on one of Goddard’s space stations to find that she was no longer his lab manager, to find that she was _avoiding_ him, when for so long she had been the closest thing he had to a friend in this place. And when he had gone to her apartment that morning, when he had confronted her about it…

She had tried to make light of her current condition, but Marius had not believed in that pretended nonchalance. And she should have known better than to pretend to it. The man who had once gone by Victor Stukov had access to all of the medical files for Goddard personnel, and had been able to get Rosemary’s files for Marius in exchange for a favor, long owed.

They painted a grim picture, those files.

Rosemary was dying. It was only a matter of when, now.

Too soon. It was too soon. She was barely more than sixty; she should have had another decade, at least. She should have had a chance to retire. She should have had a chance to leave this place.

She would never have gone. Marius had known her for long enough now to know that this place, these labs, meant to her what Decima meant to him. Her life’s work, her _legacy_ was in making certain that the scientists she managed reached their full potential under her care, even if no one would remember her name. She never would have chosen an easy retirement.

But she should have had the choice.

He had offered her Decima, in the moment. Before he had known that she truly was dying, he had offered it to her, this damn retrovirus that _did not work_.

 _Yet_ , he reminded himself. It did not work _yet_.

Still, what had he been thinking?

And even as he asked himself that, he knew. He had been remembering a time, long ago, his sister dying in a hospice bed, a long, slow death by radiation poisoning. He had been remembering every family member who had gone before her. He had been remembering what had set him on this path.

More than four decades later, and he still had found no solution to the problem of pain, of suffering, of _death_.

Perhaps Decima would never work. Perhaps it was only the feverish daydream of a young boy, desperate to save a family that was already gone. But if that was the case, what had he done with his life? How could he justify the sacrifices he had made? How could he justify the deaths he had caused?

But no, he had made progress, even if it was hard to see. Better to believe that he would make it work. Better to press onward, even if the task was futile.

Marius started and almost dropped the flask he was working on, shocked by his own thoughts. Did he really believe that? That this had become a futile task, that Decima would never reach its full potential? Of course not. The tools at his disposal were becoming more powerful by the day; his work, more refined. But still, the time wore on him. A life’s work. A lifetime of work, nearly twenty years, in Russia, another eight here at Goddard, and Decima still did not work.

And Rosemary was dying.

He set the flask aside carefully and sluiced the remaining suds from his arms. His lab techs could deal with this later. He needed to be elsewhere.

He did not realize where elsewhere was until he found himself stopping on the second floor, where the administrative offices were. Down at the end of the hall, he could see the office that had once been Rosemary’s, and long force of habit almost sent him there. But no; someone else worked there now. Instead, turn this corner, and that one, and walk down to the third door on the left.

Rosemary was alone, her door ajar. She looked up when he pushed the door further open and knocked on the doorframe, those tired lines that had been so apparent on her face this morning only just barely hidden by makeup.

“Dr. Vandersee. You needed something?” And then she frowned, obviously irritated that she had fallen into her own routine where he was concerned, and turned her attention conspicuously to the computer screen in front of her. “Whatever it is, you should be going to Ron and Jerry for it now. Need me to page them?”

Marius shook his head. “I am here on a personal errand.”

That got her attention. She fixed him with a piercing look, one of her eyebrows raised dangerously. “A personal errand.” She shook her head and let out a little huff of disappointment. “Don’t tell me, you want to try pitching me that damn retrovirus of yours again.”

“No.” The word slipped out before he was sure of the truth of it.

Rosemary looked a little taken aback, as if she had been prepared to argue. “No? Well, I can’t think what other personal business you might have with me.”

“Have you eaten lunch?” She had been irritable and nauseous when he had come to her apartment that morning, had refused his offer to make her one of the meal shakes she had apparently been subsisting on for months.

She made a face. “I’m still nauseous.”

“Typical reaction to drugs you are on. But you need to eat.” He rapped the doorframe decisively. “Stay here. I will be back with juice.”

He got a glimpse of her startled profile as he turned away. He worried that she might shut her door and lock him out just to spite him, but when he returned five minutes later with a bottle of grape juice and a pre-packaged protein shake from the kitchenette down the hall, her door was still ajar.

The look she gave him when he entered her office again was strange. Half irritation, half wonder, a curious, searching look that said without words that she wanted to know _what_ , exactly, he thought he was up to.

Marius wished he knew. He set the bottles on her desk. “Drink juice first. Should help with nausea. Then protein shake. You need to eat. Doctor’s orders.”

“You’re _not_ my doctor,” she said with a little shake of her head.

“I am now.” He picked the juice back up and opened it, handing it to her. “I will stay here until you drink that. For rest of day, if necessary.”

Rosemary gave him a sour look and took the open bottle, sniffing cautiously at it. Her skin bleached ashy-pale and she set the bottle down, sinking back in her chair with her eyes shut. “Damn, but this is worse than morning sickness.”

Marius came around to her side of the desk and knelt at the side of her chair, setting his hands on her arm where it rested on the armrest and ignoring the baleful look she shot him from under half-open eyelids. “Rosemary. Please?”

Her eyes had fallen shut—a clear sign of her exhaustion, he thought—but they flashed open at that, startled and confused once more. “Need to keep me going long enough to make a good Decima candidate, huh?”

He shook his head fervently. “Forgive me for that. It was…” The offer he had given her that morning had been the voice of desperation, the part of him that had somehow known that her nonchalance had meant her current condition was much worse than it appeared. “It was wrong of me to suggest it.”

She leaned sideways, the elbow of her other arm on her desk, and looked down at him with a frown. “I would make an exceptional test subject, you know. All the most accurate observations of how it feels to be taken apart from the inside out.”

The thought sent a cold shudder down his spine. “And I would have been the one to kill you.”

“Cancer’s already doing that,” she said flippantly.

“I refuse to help it, then.”

She tilted her head and rested the side of it against her fist, considering him. “That’s new.”

Marius removed his hands from her arm, and, before she could react, scooped her hand up off the armrest and pressed a light kiss to the back of it. He didn’t dare look up for her reaction, but her soft, startled exhale was loud enough for him to hear.

“That’s… very new.”

“No. Not new.” Something he had kept to himself, buried deep because he dared not acknowledge it if he still wanted to work side-by-side with this woman. But now… “You are no longer my lab manager,” he said, his voice sounding small and strained even to is own ears. “And I…” his voice choked in his throat and he forced his way through it. “I do not want you to be alone.”

Another small, startled breath from Rosemary. “Dmitri…”

He looked up at her again, studying her face and unable to read it. “I will be alone, once you are gone.”

“I thought you and that old friend of yours were getting along again.”

He shook his head. “Viktor keeps his distance. He knows too many of my secrets and I know too many of his for either of us to be comfortable with one another again.”

“Well, if that’s your criteria for friendship, I can’t imagine why you aren’t running away from me as fast as your legs can take you,” she said, sharp and sarcastic. “There’s a reason I’m alone, darling. Make an effort to get along with your other coworkers. Leave me be.”

“They do not make an effort to get along with me,” he shot back. “You do. And I…” He pressed another light kiss to the back of her hand, watching her face for a reaction this time. Parted lips, a little sigh, a certain softness around her eyes. “I will be alone when you are gone,” he repeated. “Let me at least make certain that you are not alone until then.”

Rosemary stared at him for a long, quiet moment, startled, wide-eyed, _frightened_. She opened her mouth as if to speak… and then closed it again, in a firm tight line, the rest of her features drawing themselves behind an expressionless mask as she shook her head. “Save your efforts for the living, Dmitri. I don’t have anything left for you but my death.” She extracted her hand from his and turned back to her computer. “I’ll drink the juice. Get back to work.”

“Rosemary…”

“You have three overdue reports,” she snapped.

“You are not my lab manager any more.” Marius got to his feet, one hand on the back of her chair. “Whether my reports are overdue or not is none of your concern.”

“They keep me in the loop.” She picked up the bottle of juice and took a sip, her mouth pressing shut again into that thin, tight line as she swallowed. “Go get some work done.”

“Rosemary…”

“We’re done here, Dmitri.”

He turned to leave.

A flash, a jerk. Elias wrapped his arms around his middle. “It was too late then, wasn’t it?” He asked his empty lab. “Too late for her, and too late for me.”

“You’re still alive. That’s all that’s needed for change.” Eris’s voice echoed in his ear again, but of Eris herself there was no sign. “But if you think it would help, I could make that your new reality. Build on that small change. Switch the memory of her last months out for something else.”

Elias let out a raspy laugh. “Ah, yes, she seemed so willing to accept _that_ from me.”

“Wait.”

As Marius stepped into the hallway, there was a sound behind him, like the wheels of a desk chair shoved away violently.

“Wait,” Rosemary called out, her voice small and raspy and broken. “Wait, please,” she called again, and he turned to find her half standing, leaning hard against her desk, a desperate look on her face.

“Rosemary?”

“I don’t know how to accept that sort of thing, you know,” she said, shame radiating from every line of her body. “I… I don’t know why anyone would want to look after me.”

Marius stepped back into her office and shut the door deliberately behind him before returning to her side. “I do not know myself,” he chided, knowing his relief must be showing on his face. “You are a dreadful woman.”

She let out a laugh that was almost a sob. “I shouldn’t, you know. It’s easier to do my job if I…” But she reached for him one-handed, her fingers closing around his upper arm, and when Marius opened his arms for her she turned to him for support instead of her desk, folding herself against his chest. “I don’t have much left to offer you.”

“I do not need much,” he murmured. “And I cannot offer you much in return, you know.”

“I know.”

“I can give you more than that,” Eris said. “I can give you her final months. I can give her a clean death, as these things go. If you want to imagine it.”

Elias shook his head. “No. It was… that was enough.” Enough to stiffen his resolve, to remind him of what he _really_ was, remind him that he had turned himself into someone who did not even deserve that small scrap of kindness, that bittersweet joy. He took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

There was a sad little chuckle against his ear. “I see we’ve taken one step forward and two steps back with you.” Eris sighed. “Ah, well, it was worth a shot. Want to see what the others are up to?”

He nodded, and the wall of his lab disappeared, revealing a tableau. Captain Lovelace and Lieutenant Lambert at a pair of garish podiums, spotlights glaring down on them both. A cheering crowd beyond them, a worried looking Dr. Fourier front and center.

Elias let out a bitter laugh as she explained the game they were playing. Ask Isabel Lovelace and Sam Lambert to set their everlasting feud aside? When the prizes offered were so grand? They never had been able to before. And with Eris there, goading them on, plucking their petty grievances out of their minds and airing them, laying before them every reason why they should make the selfish choice?This could go no way but poorly, even with the entire fate of the mission at stake.

Or at least, it _should_ have gone poorly.

It did not.

Elias could not believe his eyes.

“See?” His wall faded back into existence, and Eris was once again at his side. “They managed it.”

“I did not expect…” He turned to Eris with a frown. “They cannot have changed so much.”

Eris gave him a look he shied away from, soft and affectionate. “It’s about trust, doctor. And that sort of trust has never come easily to you, has it? Not then, and not now.”

Elias turned away, not able to bear that look, that face any longer. He cleared his throat. “What happens next?”

“Next? I die."

Elias whipped his head back around to look at her. “What?”

She smiled painfully back at him. “Your Captain Lovelace is doing an excellent job of buying me a little more time, but Mr. Cutter has never been all that patient.”

He swallowed hard. “This is almost over, then.”

“Yes.”

He lifted his chin, a show of defiance he was still struggling to feel. What she had offered him had been seductive... but it would have made no difference, in the end. Because Rosemary would still be dead, and he still would have failed to save her. “So why are you still wasting your time on an old man who will never change?” 

“Because you haven’t been listening to me,” Eris chided, in that old familiar way of Rosemary’s. She reached for him, cupping his face in her hands as if he were something infinitely precious and dear to her. “And there’s just enough of her left in me to want to say it straight out.”

“What, then?” he asked, his voice shaking now.

“Don’t be alone.” She gave him a long, intent look, until he shut his eyes beneath its intensity. “I know it makes your job that much harder, but you do not have to be alone.”

“I can’t…”

“She’s dead. But you’re alive, and your crew is alive. And they _need_ you. Let yourself need them too.” She inhaled sharply. “Time’s up.”

Elias felt the ghost of a single, cool kiss, pressed to the center of his forehead. And then, everything around him burst like a soap bubble, and he was back in the cargo bay with the rest of the crew, everyone shakily removing their hands from the depressions in the side of Box 953.

Captain Lovelace took a deep breath. “We’re… we’re back. For real this time. I think.”

“Yeah… I… I think so,” Dr. Fourier said shakily.

“Selberg? Hui? Fisher? You all okay?” Lovelace asked, her voice firming as she took command of the situation.

“I… I think so,” Elias said, ignoring the tears beaded at the corners of his eyes. No doubt a reaction to whatever drugs the box had pumped into all of them to keep them unconscious while it did its work. Never mind that he found the words of the others drifting past him, unheard and unacknowledged. Never mind that he found himself lingering as the others drifted out of the cargo bay.

He pressed his hand to the smooth, black surface of Box 953, wondering…

“I offered her a place here.”

Lovelace’s words startled Elias out of his reverie. He turned his head to look at her, where she had anchored herself on the handbar next to the one his feet were hooked through. “Why?” he asked, an unconscious frown pulling the corners of his mouth down.

An echo of his frown creased Captain Lovelace’s brow, and she reached out and pressed her hand to the surface of the box, palm flat against it the way Elias’s was. “Because she was a person.”

Those words cut Elias to the core. “Yes.”

That got him a strange look from Lovelace, sharp and questioning. And perhaps she was right to, when he always treated Rhea like the tool that she was. But Eris had been… She had been…

“Do you think there’s anything left in there?” Lovelace asked.

“I do not know.” He paused, his fingers tensing against the side of the box. “I could do a scan. Find out.”

“Do. And if there’s anything left…” She trailed off, staring at the side of the box, her frown deepening.

“Captain?”

“I…” she sighed and returned her hand to her side. “I don’t know what we’ll do if there is. Just… just find out?”

Elias nodded. “Yes. Of course. I am always happy to be of assistance.”

“Thanks, Selberg.” She turned to him, studying his face with a frown. “Maybe when you’re done…”

“Captain?” He hoped that she did not intend to press any new social obligations on him. He did not think he could bear such things at the moment.

Lovelace shook her head, as if whatever she had seen in his expression had changed her mind about what she was about to say. “Never mind. Nothing that matters.” She clapped him briefly on the shoulder before pushing off towards the entrance to the cargo bay.

And Elias was left alone.


End file.
